IT has now been seven long and bloody years since the war in Syria began. Outside of the country itself it’s a conflict that is all but ignored these days. Perhaps it’s worth pausing for a moment on that very thought alone.

Just how is it that almost half a million dead, 5.4 million refugees and 6.1 million people internally displaced can all but vanish from the international news headlines?

Seemingly too complex and labyrinthine to fully comprehend, the world, it seems, has since grown weary of the war.

For those Syrians continuing to live with its horrors day in, day out, that weariness takes a different shape.

There are few places in Syria right now where this is more apparent than in the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta, just 20 minutes from the capital Damascus.

There the UN believes there are close to 400,000 people trapped under increasing bombardment. Over the past two weeks more than 80 civilians, including 30 children, have been killed in Syrian Government attacks.

The siege of Eastern Ghouta is taking its toll in other ways too, with the Syrian regime currently preventing UN food convoys from entering the region.

“We recently conducted a study in the area to estimate malnutrition levels among children and found that in those under five years old, 12 per cent suffer from malnutrition,” says Tamara Kummer of the UN children’s agency UNICEF.

“This is the highest rate of acute malnutrition that has ever been recorded in Syria since the beginning of the conflict,” she added.

Seven long years into Syria’s seemingly bottomless misery and still children starve and find themselves among the worst victims of the war.

One can only guess at what those suffering there and elsewhere right now make of the current talk among various commentators, and indeed governments and leaders, who write the war off as finished.

At the most basic level the war is clearly far from over, but few would disagree with the conclusion that its wider geopolitical nature and direction has definitely changed.

Writing in Foreign Policy magazine recently Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Centre, observed that since mid-2014, there have been two parallel wars taking place on Syrian soil.

“The ‘original’ war is the fight between the Sunni Arab rebels and the [President] Bashar al-Assad regime, which is centred on the more densely populated area of western Syria. The second war is the contest between the Islamic State group and the US-led global coalition assembled against it,” Spyer explained.

He contends that both these wars are close to conclusion and that Assad's survival is now no longer in doubt.

Many other analysts share this assessment, and certainly on these levels at least the original war in Syria appears to be entering its endgame.

Currently the Islamic State group has lost all the territory it seized in 2014. The Syrian army meanwhile, backed by Russia and Iran, has confined other anti-government rebels to besieged pockets in the south, on the outskirts of Damascus, like Eastern Ghouta, and in the northwest.

All opposition hopes of removing the Assad regime have all but vanished. But still the war refuses to die and instead takes new forms.

As it currently stands the latest phase has little to do with Syria, apart from the fact that it’s taking place on its soil. Complex as it continues to be, three main groups of “players” are now identifiable in the conflict. The first is the Syrian Government regime-Iran-Russian bloc, which controls over half of the country’s territory and the majority of its population.

The second comprises the Kurdish-led and US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which controls the oil-rich area of southern Deir Ezzor.

The third – and the one that has recently captured the few headlines from the war – is the alliance between Turkey (and to a smaller degree Qatar) and the Sunni Islamist and jihadi rebels of northwest Syria.

But even these key blocs are not clearly defined entities. In all three different members maintain their own specific links or ties with rival camps. To take one example, while Turkey and the United States are ostensibly Nato allies, Washington is directly opposed to some of the jihadi rebel groups with whom Turkey cooperates. That much became dangerously evident recently after the Turkish military and its allied Syrian rebel factions launched an air and ground offensive, ironically codenamed “Operation Olive Branch”, on the Kurdish-controlled border region of Afrin.

The Turkish Government said the aim was to drive out members of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia, which it considers an extension of a Kurdish rebel group, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) it has fought for decades.

But the US, of course, has been heavily reliant on an alliance, led by the YPG, to conduct its own campaign against the jihadists of IS on the ground in eastern Syria. The best Washington could do under the circumstances was to urge its Nato ally Turkey to “de-escalate, limit its military actions, and avoid civilian casualties”.

Every day such twists and contortions take place within the war over Syria. So just what has the Syrian conflict become, what drives its protagonists and where might it be heading?

To take the first of these questions, it’s probably fair to say that as it exists on a map Syria is largely a fiction. The country has been shattered into a battlefield for warring factions, one that effectively comprises de facto statelets. While the Assad regime controls roughly half the country, the rest is up for grabs.

As a recent editorial in The Guardian succinctly summed it up, the operational maxim of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” was only ever a short-term convenience and not a long-term commitment in the Syrian war.

These days, as the military and geopolitical kaleidoscope has shifted, the focus once again is on “my ally’s ally is my enemy”. The Turkey, US, Kurdish debacle over Ankara’s Afrin offensive is the most recent point in case.

In other words what the Syrian conflict has become is an international battleground, throwing the major powers, regional neighbours, ethnic and religious forces against each other in a fight for strategic influence, territory and power – and also what drives its protagonists.

Given the multiple crises that could potentially spawn from such rivalry, the capacity for any of them to spiral out of control is now set to be one of the biggest concerns in terms of predicting where the Syrian conflict might now be heading.

For all parties, not least the US, it poses enormous challenges in terms of shaping battlefield realities.

As analyst Samer Abboud, writing in the online magazine Middle East Eye recently highlighted, those in the US foreign policy establishment that had long clamoured for clarity and vision for the American role in Syria finally got what they were looking for a few weeks ago when US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson outlined Washington’s policy in Syria.

“Tillerson's speech was effectively a declaration of intent to occupy Syria, an open-ended military commitment ostensibly to eliminate Islamic State remnants, contain Iranian expansionism in the region, and ensure regime change, the latter which the US has never seemed very interested in,” wrote Abboud.

But as any quick survey of the current challenges indicate, even with a US-led coalition maintaining a ground presence the path ahead is full of pitfalls.

Even at greatly diminished strength, IS remains a threat. Many of the group’s fighters melted back into the civilian population along what some call the “Syraq” corridor between eastern Syria and western Iraq.

The Kurds in Syria are also a major flashpoint too. Their role as essential US allies against IS has not mollified the Turks, who continue to view the Kurdish YPG as nothing more than re-branded PKK terrorists. As for the regime of President Assad, he isn’t going anywhere soon and is still holed up in the fortress that the capital Damascus has become.

The people of Damascus might still live with countless checkpoints, sandbag walls and men in uniform wielding Kalashnikovs, but Assad remains there. His fractured country’s supply line from Lebanon has remained open at all times, as have the Mediterranean ports of Tartus and Latakia. In Damascus streets, vendors in the old market, the Al-Hamidiyah Souk, continue to sell everything from designer clothes to the latest iPhone.

“The war is gradually coming to an end. Assad has won, and he is going to stay,” was how Robert Ford, the last US ambassador in Damascus summed up the situation recently. Unpalatable as that might be, Washington will just have to swallow it for now.

On the wider level Abboud sees America’s now declared role as outlined by Tillerson as being fraught with other potential hazards, not least when it comes to any exit strategy.

“The commitment to a Syria occupation may have been made out of convenience, ineptitude, a failure to imagine alternatives, the appetite of the domestic war machine, or all of the above, but what is certain is that getting out of the Syrian situation will unlikely be easier than getting in,” warns Abboud.

And so the United States, for the foreseeable future, will continue to be a key player in the new geopolitical contests pursued over the ruins of Syria.

“Turks against Kurds, Israel against Iran and its proxies, the United States against Iran, and now, potentially, Ankara against Washington,” is how Spyer sums up the key protagonists in the future stand-off.

“These external forces are all determined to gain advantage over one another in Syria and so, even as Syria’s two long-standing conflicts wind down, war and strife are not departing the area. Welcome to Syria 2.0,” says Spyer.

Determining just who will be the victors on this supercharged geopolitical battlefield is hard to predict, but if one thing is certain it’s that ordinary Syrians on the ground will continue to be the biggest losers.

The talk might be of wars ending or changing course but every day, meanwhile, death and destruction continues to rain down for thousands.

Far from such horrors in the picturesque snowy retreat of Davos at the World Economic Forum last week, some Syria experts seemed preoccupied with the notion that the war was all but over and were already talking of reconstruction and investment. No doubt at some point these will be vital to Syria’s future, but the feeling remains that such talk right now is still premature.

“I don’t think the war is over. It’s going to be a long, contracted, bloody campaign sadly, awfully. I think that’s the most likely scenario, because the Kurdish question in particular is not resolved in Syria,” Jean-Marie Guehenno, a former diplomat and senior adviser at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, said at Davos.

“The United States wants to stay in Syria, but at the same time it does not have the allies; they wouldn’t have the allies on the ground; they won’t be a decisive presence, in a nutshell. So I think it will be enough to lead to protracted war, but not to a solution,” Guehenno insisted.

Such an assessment seems the most likely scenario. Even if the original components driving the overlapping conflicts of Syria’s war are drawing to a close, they appear to be laying the ground for a new, potentially more dangerous phase. From the wombs of the old, new conflicts are growing. Syria, sadly, remains some way from peace